


The Shield Charm

by Gilli_ann



Category: Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Introspection, M/M, Memories, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-23 01:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6100208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gilli_ann/pseuds/Gilli_ann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ennis's hat evokes a lot of good memories about Jack and about love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shield Charm

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Jack, Ennis and Brokeback Mountain belong to Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry and Focus Features. I intend no copyright infringement and make no profit.

 

All his life Ennis used his hat as a shield. A shield against rain and wind-blown grit and the glare of the sun, sure enough, - but most of all against prying eyes. The hat gave him the barrier he craved to keep himself and his emotions private and safely out of sight. 

He felt insecure and unprotected without his hat.

But as he aged and grew wiser during many long and lonely years, he realized that the nature of both his deep-set vulnerability and his defense mechanisms had evolved. They became ever more strongly connected to vivid memories of Jack. Memories of him and Jack, together.

Many of his most precious memories were tied to moments involving the two of them and their hats.

The first time he saw Jack, for instance. He clearly remembered nervously hiding himself from the handsome stranger, ducking away beneath his hat brim, feeling shy and on edge and out of his league. Jack probably got a good, long look at that hat before he ever saw Ennis’s face.

When he later went to Jack with an open heart, the first time they kissed in the tent on the mountain…? He had felt the need to protect his heart with his trusted shield, his hat, holding on for dear life to the rescue buoy it was to him. Jack ever so gently moved it out of the way, hands and lips and eyes seeking tender truth, giving Ennis no chance to keep his deep, deep yearning private.

One time when a storm passed through over old Brokeback, Ennis used his hat to catch hail stones in. Closing the tent up they marveled at the size of the icy pebbles he’d caught, picking them up one by one and watching them turn to water in the chilly palms of their hands. They let some melt on their tongues too, a curiously tasteless cold. Afterwards they moved on to re-heating each other thoroughly, getting it on so hotly that they probably melted all the ice in a mile’s radius.

Once when they met up in late summer, Jack found a patch of ripe wild raspberries and picked some for the two of them to share. They had brought along pots for cooking, but Jack figured his hat for the most convenient bowl. Enjoying his harvest directly from the black resistol, which spoke (and smelled) so strongly of Jack, added an unspoken dimension of intimacy to their surprise treat, something that no other and more practical vessel could have rivaled. They kissed while sharing the berries, each one of them the color and shape of a small valentine’s heart. Tasting nature’s own sweetness on each others’ tongues, their lips getting sticky with red juice and saliva, they soon left the empty hat bowl forgotten on the ground.

Then there was that one time when it rained so bad, they spent a whole day inside Jack’s fancy tent, not really minding the weather much. Eventually Ennis had to tear himself away to answer an urgent call of nature. He crawled out into the deluge in a hurry, bare as the day he was born; - except that he grabbed his hat and put it on. Ingrained habits die hard, after all. While he stood outside, getting rain-drenched from shoulder to toes and producing an impressive and steaming yellow arc, he could hear Jack laughing his ass off, watching the spectacle from the tent opening. The sight of his very own wet and nude pissing cowboy, hat firmly in place, made Jack crow with approving delight and exuberance enough to make Ennis himself chortle gleefully as he finished up. 

Another time, back when they rescued those damn stupid hippies from the flooded stream, Jack lost his new hat. The swollen waters carried it away too rapidly for them to retrieve it. Jack bitched about that the entire rest of the trip. They took turns wearing Ennis’s hat. It gave Ennis a big secret thrill to see Jack using his hat – he had to jump the man and show his enthusiasm for the sight more than once during that trip.

Many years later, during lonely trailer evenings when the two shirts had once more opened his heart, Ennis would fill the trailer’s gloom with light and love and laughter from a long catalogue of cherished and memorable hat moments. He flooded himself with recollections and emotions, nodding fondly to each one as to a dear old friend. He’d smile tenderly then to the invisible but nevertheless intensely present Jack, though fierce melancholy and grief would never fail to make their simultaneous appearance.

The shirts and his hat. They held so many memories of brief but good times shared; - right moments, true moments, little pieces of perfect time that spelled out happiness and affection and a soul-deep connection between them that Ennis couldn’t now deny to himself. Nor did he want to deny it, - though that realization had come too late by far.

In later years Ennis continued feeling extremely vulnerable in public without his hat, felt exposed and unclothed going bareheaded. But increasingly it wasn’t the hat’s tangible protection from curious eyes or unkind weather that he needed. It was the solid, secret support from all those good Jack moments that his hat evoked. It was the safe and sure knowledge of Jack’s love, which Ennis wrapped around himself anew like a blessing and a protective charm whenever he put his hat on to go out into the world.


End file.
